Alzheimers Disease (AD) is a progressive disease that destroys memory and other important mental functions. It is the 6th leading cause of death in the US, and it does not have a cure. The latter fact strongly affects a family of a newly diagnosed with AD patient. Exploring the landscape of ongoing clinical trials, targeting AD, is the next step family takes to assess possible treatment options. Clinicaltrials.gov is a database of clinical studies conducted around the world and is a great place to start exploring experimental treatment possibilities. It has user friendly interface and provides extensive amount of clinical trials information. However, it could be overwhelming for someone without special training to dive through tabulated extensive information available at clinicaltrials.gov. A web-based visualization tool, which summaries Alzheimer`s Disease clinal trial information while sourcing data from clinicaltrials.gov, could be a useful tool for those families, impacted by the illness and seeking a quick visual reference guide on Alzheimers Disease clinical trials past and present research.
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Gantt chart was created for those studies with available starting and ending dates to visualize the landscape of Alzheimers Disease clinical trials over time.
Interactive lineplot was created for those studies with available age elligibility creteria, where a line represents age elligibility for a particular study against the number of subjects enrolled in a study.
Gantt chart (Figure 1) and Age Ellegibility plot (Figure 2) were created for currently recruiting interventional phase 3 trials.
Figure 1: Gantt chart
Figure 2: Interactive plot with lines for eligible age for different clinical trail phases
Alzheimers Disease is the disease of an older population and clinical trials in the past were targeting older subjects. However, since many hundreds of clinical trials failed in finding a cure, research focuse has shifted to younger population as well with the hope to prevent Alzheimers before the major damage to the brain is done in the later stages of Alzheimers Disease.
Figure 3:
Shiny dashboard simplifies Alzheimers Disease landscape research for an inexperienced user and as such provides benefit for a family of a newly diagnosed Alzheimers Disease patient.